Riven drew his chair up, hands folded. The paper's cover read: CODEX IMPERATORUM, with a string of numerals below.
Corren spoke in the same crisp cadence. "Understand: every empire collapses, eventually. The problem is not one of will, nor resource, nor even violence. It is a matter of how the center controls the periphery, and how the failures of the rim spread inward."
The first page was rules of succession. Riven had read at least five iterations, but this one was newly annotated. The margin, in Corren's hand, read: Note the minimums. Not the maximums.
A smaller nation, under stress, collapses. An empire fails inwards: the outlands fracture first, but the rot hollows the center only after the rim has drifted or died. For the system to work, Riven saw, the center had to remain vital, able to adapt, else the web would slacken and the prey escape.
They read through three hundred years of collapse at a page per minute: the insurrections of the Mournspire; the dry collapse of Almaris's trade ring; the chronic infighting of Caelmare's naval dynasts. Riven memorized the rhythm: expand, freeze, rot, retreat.
"If the Emperor is the Foundation," Corren said, "then what is the function of everyone else?"
"Scaffolding," Riven replied, instantly. "To keep the shape until the next layer is poured."
Corren showed teeth, quick and dry. "Very good."
In the last section, the lesson shifted into metaphysics. Here, at the Empire's core, the Lexpriests ruled even the language. Every major event flowed through the Ministry of Canon, defining the past as a way to guide the future.
Riven parsed the function of priests: not to bind the people to faith, but to interpret the gods' silence as mandate. He filed this alongside previous lessons, rhetoric, logic, and the simple, repeated axiom that, he who names a thing owns it.
At the end of the lesson, Corren shut the folio with a snap.
"That is all," he said. He gestured toward the door, but Riven knew the subtext: do not linger, do not speak of this, do not act beyond what was instructed.
'Or do, if you are able,' Riven thought, and left.
The palace's underhalls were always cool, always aired, always almost empty.
Riven took his lunch alone, as ever, in the solarium, not for the flowers, but for the light's refraction as it lanced through glass, fragmenting into color patterns on the marble. He used the quiet to re-score the morning's observations.
For every major pattern revealed, three minor ones appeared, half-hidden or implied. The world was not a hierarchy; it was recursive. Every function spawned subroutines. The minor houses, the servant dynasties, even the guilds, they all traced their own webs around the central axis.
Riven finished the meal, then folded a napkin into a tessellation. He watched, fascinated, as shadow and edge shifted endlessly when he rotated it. 'The illusion of change,' he thought, 'but still only paper.'
He spent the afternoon in the family corridor, seated between the corridor's double arch. Only two people ever passed this way: Lis, the Emperor's daughter, and Soren, the little shadow assigned as his minder-protege.
Lis was older by four years but entered with the over-brightness of someone hoping to be respected for it. She wore a new set of ink-stained gloves and carried a book of Aetheric Theory that was three grades beyond what most palace tutors permitted.
Her hair, pale gold like the palace's own banners, was cropped asymmetric along the jaw, an explicit rebellion against the age's fashion.
Soren trailed after, feet scuffing, hands in sleeves. He was Riven's age, but where Riven was all right angles, Soren was a vector of graceless energy, thin, freckled, with a mouth set in permanent suspicion.
"There you are," Lis said, flipping the book shut with her thumb. "They said you'd be in the library. Why aren't you ever where logic says you'll be?"
"Because habitual predictions are loopholes." Riven did not get up; he did not even tilt his head to mask the sarcasm. "If I wanted to be found, I'd be waiting in line. Like everyone else."
Lis put her hands on her hips, looked at him sidelong, and smirked. "And if they need you urgently?"
"Then they'll find me anyway. The palace is built for it."
Soren perched on the opposite banister, eyes flickering between the two of them, hungry for a secret he could preemptively weaponize. Riven noted the muscle jump at the corner of the boy's jaw. He was ready to report back whatever he heard, no matter how trivial.
Lis leaned in, voice quiet. "Do you ever get tired of seeing through people?"
"Not yet," Riven admitted.
Lis looked for a heartbeat as if she might laugh, then just shrugged. "Father says you're due in the Observatory at nine."
"I know."
"Of course you do." She eyed the napkin-fold, then reached over and snapped it open. "You still do this thing?" She began to fold it again, awkwardly, recreating a rough hexagon. "Is it a puzzle?"
Riven considered telling her the truth: that he'd started folding paper because control over angle and crease was the only tolerable outlet in a world whose mistakes were otherwise chronic and unfixable. Instead, he lied with the flatness of someone expertly practiced.
"It calms the hands."
Lis laughed, a real one this time; he could see her shoulders soften. Soren, still perched opposite, didn't buy it.
"Not true," Soren interjected. "He does it to irritate Nurse. Last week he made fifty and hid them under her scry basin."
"Forty-seven," said Riven, unable to help himself. "The others dissolved in the steam."
Lis snorted, almost pleased.
Soren, on some cue Riven couldn't trace, rolled off the banister and set off down the corridor, probably to report the conversation to one of the staffers. Lis watched Soren go, then regarded Riven with an odd look, her finger tracing the napkin's folds with deliberate rotations. "If you could change one thing about the palace, what would it be?"
Riven took her measure, then the corridor's. The light had shifted; the sun now backlit Lis's hair, rendering the outline almost lucent. Sincerity, weaponized.
"The echo," he said finally. "It's impossible for a conversation to exist here without being carried somewhere else."
Lis lifted her brow, as if impressed, or disappointed, he was never sure with her. "I'd get rid of the protocols," she said. "Make everyone wear what they wanted and never bow, ever again."